CSEE Ph.D. student Kavita Krishnaswamy will give a talk entitled Robotics for Independence sponsored by Refresh Baltimore on May 20 at 7:00pm. The talk will be given at Betamore, 1111 Light Street in Baltimore. Refreshments at 6:30, RSVP online.

Robotics for Independence

Kavita Krishnaswamy

7:00pm Wednesday, 20 May 2015
Betamore, 1111 Light St., Baltimore

The future is here! In this talk, Kavita will discuss the development of robotic systems and how they provide assistance and increase independence for people with disabilities. Kavita will introduce several prototype robotic systems that support transferring, repositioning, and personal care, and focus on accessible user interfaces for control that are feasible for persons with severe disabilities.

Kavita Krishnaswamy is a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County working with Dr. Tim Oates. As a professional researcher with a physical disability, Kavita is motivated by a powerful, innate force: autonomy is the soul of independent daily living that is achieved with the advancement of technology. She is both a Ford Foundation Predoctoral and National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. Kavita has worked at the National Science Foundation's Engineering Research Center – Quality of Life Technology Center (QoLT) in Carnegie Mellon and University of Pittsburgh and IBM Business consulting services.

Refresh Baltimore describes itself as "a community made up of sharp design and development professionals, creative minds and Baltimore technologists looking to learn from one another and apply critical thinking to the industry."

The UMBC Cybersecurity Graduate Program will hold a virtual information session at 6:00pm on June 16. Participate to learn about the  program options and find out how a master’s degree or graduate certificate can help you advance in the cybersecurity industry. During the online information session, graduate program director Richard Forno will discuss courses, credit requirements and prerequisites, and admissions processes.

The session will cover cybersecurity programs at both UMBC's Main Campus and UMBC-Shady Grove in Rockville, MD. It will provide an overview of our innovative curriculum, practice-oriented instruction and flexible class schedules, which are designed for working professionals.  You will also learn about admissions, curriculum, class format and the cybersecurity career outlook.

If you would like to participate in the information session, please RSVP online.

UMBC Cyber Defense Lab

Verifying Security Properties of
Cryptographic Protocols with CPSA

Edward V. Zieglar Jr.
Analysis and Design Methods
DoD Trusted Systems Research Group

12-1pm, Friday, 15 May 2015, ITE 227

The design of cryptographic protocols with well understood properties is a difficult problem. Many simple cryptographic protocols that have been designed over the years by experienced designers have been found to have subtle flaws or incorrect assumptions that have led to attacks against them. Much effort has gone into the development of theories, techniques and tools to formally analysis the security properties of cryptographic protocols in an attempt to identify and eliminate such security flaws. This talk will address basic paradigms used in the analysis and verification of the security properties of cryptographic protocols, discuss efforts to develop tools to assist designers in developing protocols with verifiable security properties and demonstrate one such tool, the Cryptographic Protocol Shapes Analyzer (CPSA), available at https://hackage.haskell.org/package/cpsa.

The GovConnect conference seeks college sophomores, juniors and seniors interested in cybersecurity to apply for free admission to its showcase event:

   GovConnects' 6th Annual Cyber Conference: Migration to the Cloud:
   Vulnerabilities and Challenges/ Opportunities and Solutions
   Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab Kossiakoff Center, 
   Wednesday, 17 June 2015, 9:00-5:00

Resumes are currently being accepted by GovConnects for a one day internship that provides free attendance.  Participation options: 8:00am–12:00noon or 12:00noon — 4:00 pm.
 
GovConnects, a program of the Howard County Chamber of Commerce, is the organizer of this event. Over 300 industry and government professionals are expected to attend the all-day conference. Student interns will be provided with breakfast and lunch. Parking is free and there is no charge for internship participants.
 
Keynote speakers are Dmitri Alperovitch, Co- Founder and CTO of CrowdStrike Inc., and LTG (R) Rhett Hernandez, Chair, Army Cyber Institute.  The conference has multiple paths of interest including breakout sessions in Mobile IT, Insider Threat, Health IT, and FedRAMP. Interns will be able to attend a breakout session of choice and have access to the who's who of the conference cyber speakers. Tech Talks will feature new products and ideas pitched by companies and judged by a panel of industry experts including representatives from Leidos, Ciena, Honeywell, Dell Federal, and Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab.
 
Cyber 6.0 is an excellent opportunity for technical candidates (For example, Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, and Computer Engineering, but not limited to these fields.) to meet and interact with industry and federal government officials. Conference sponsors have agreed to review internsÕ resumes for potential employment eligibility, if interested.
 
Several sponsors have current programs in place that support technical students close to graduation in obtaining federal clearances.
 
The opportunity to attend the conference, gain valuable information about the trends/forecasts for cybersecurity issues and technology, and meet companies, speakers and potential employers is a day well spent!
 
If you are interested in attending, explore the conference details and send your resume to Tom Sabia, Conference Intern Coordinator at   or

CSEE professor Cynthia Matuszek was interviewed on her research on gender bias in online images associated with occupations by the CBC Spark radio program on technology trends.

The research was published in a recent paper, Unequal Representation and Gender Stereotypes in Image Search Results for Occupations, that was recognized as a best paper in the 2015 ACM CHI Conference. This conference is considered the most prestigious in the field of human–computer interaction, and is one of the top ranked computer science conferences.

Professor Matuszek does research on robotics and natural language processing and combines these two interests to build better human-robot interaction systems and to study the underlying problem of grounded language acquisition, i.e., how robots (and people!) can extract semantically meaningful representations of human language by mapping those representations to the noisy, unpredictable physical world in which they operate.

Mobile Computing and Smart Home
Automation Systems Demonstrations

UMBC Students in CMSC 628 and 691

12:00-1:30pm Tuesday, 12 May 2015
Third floor main corridor, ITE Building

The students in UMBC's graduate Introduction to Mobile Computing class and Systems for Smart Home Automation course will showcase their cutting-edge projects and application that use mobile phones, tablets, cloudservices and smarthome sensors.

Come and enjoy the demonstrations that range from cool smartphone games to smartphone-based educational tools to location‐based mobile phone services to voice and mind controlled home appliances.

For more information, contact Prof. Nilanjan Banerjee at .

Career Opportunities in Cybersecurity and
the Information Assurance Directorate

Neal Ziring
Technical Director, Information Assurance Directorate
National Security Agency

1:00pm-2:00pm Friday, 15 May 2015

ITE-325b (CSEE Dept Conference room)

Mr. Ziring will discuss career opportunities in cybersecurity and what NSA's Information Assurance Directorate does.

Neal Ziring is a technical director in the Information Assurance Directorate (IAD) at NSA. The IAD provides cryptographic, network, and operational security to protect and defend national security systems. Previously, Mr. Ziring was a technical director for the Vulnerability Analysis and Operations Group, which provides technology evaluations, defensive operations, and secure configuration guidance for the DoD and the IC. During that time, he served as security architect for two major NSA mission systems programs, collaborated with NIST on the Security Content Automation Protocol (SCAP), and led analyses of cloud computing and IPv6. Before joining the NSA in 1989, he worked at AT&T Bell Labs. He has a BS in EE and an MS in Computer Science from Washington University.

Spring 2015 IS Distinguished Lecture 
Department of Information Systems

Opinion Mining, Machine Learning and Big Data

Dr. Philip Bourne
Associate Director for Data Science
The National Institutes of Health

10:00am Tuesday, 5 May 2015, ITE 456, UMBC

Philip E. Bourne is the Associate Director for Data Science at the National Institutes of Health. Formally he was Associate Vice Chancellor for Innovation and Industry Alliances, a Professor in the Department of Pharmacology and Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of California San Diego, Associate Director of the RCSB Protein Data Bank and an Adjunct Professor at the Sanford Burnham Institute.

Bourne's professional interests focus on service and research. He serves the national biomedical community through contributing ways to maximize the value (and hence accessibility) of scientific data. His research focuses on relevant biological and educational outcomes derived from computation and scholarly communication. This implies algorithms, text mining, machine learning, metalanguages, biological databases, and visualization applied to problems in systems pharmacology, evolution, cell signaling, apoptosis, immunology and scientific dissemination. He has published over 300 papers and five books, one of which sold over 150,000 copies.

Bourne is a Past President of the International Society for Computational Biology, an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the International Society for Computational Biology and the American Medical Informatics Association.  His awards include: the Jim Gray eScience Award (2010), the Benjamin Franklin Award (2009), the Flinders University Convocation Medal for Outstanding Achievement (2004), the Sun Microsystems Convergence Award (2002) and the CONNECT Award for new inventions (1996 and 1997).

Ph.D. Dissertation Defense

A Semantic Resolution Framework for Integrating
Manufacturing Service Capability Data

Yan Kang

10:00am Monday 27 April 2015, ITE 217b

Building flexible manufacturing supply chains requires availability of interoperable and accurate manufacturing service capability (MSC) information of all supply chain participants. Today, MSC information, which is typically published either on the supplier’s web site or registered at an e-marketplace portal, has been shown to fall short of interoperability and accuracy requirements. The issue of interoperability can be addressed by annotating the MSC information using shared ontologies. However, this ontology-based approach faces three main challenges: (1) lack of an effective way to automatically extract a large volume of MSC instance data hidden in the web sites of manufacturers that need to be annotated; (2) difficulties in accurately identifying semantics of these extracted data and resolving semantic heterogeneities among individual sources of these data while integrating them under shared formal ontologies; (3) difficulties in the adoption of ontology-based approaches by the supply chain managers and users because of their unfamiliarity with the syntax and semantics of formal ontology languages such as the web ontology language (OWL).

The objective of our research is to address the main challenges of ontology-based approaches by developing an innovative approach that is able to extract MSC instances from a broad range of manufacturing web sites that may present MSC instances in various ways, accurately annotate MSC instances with formal defined semantics on a large scale, and integrate these annotated MSC instances into formal manufacturing domain ontologies to facilitate the formation of supply chains of manufacturers. To achieve this objective, we propose a semantic resolution framework (SRF) that consists of three main components: a MSC instance extractor, a MSC Instance annotator and a semantic resolution knowledge base. The instance extractor builds a local semantic model that we call instance description model (IDM) for each target manufacturer web site. The innovative aspect of the IDM is that it captures the intended structure of the target web site and associates each extracted MSC instance with a context that describes possible semantics of that instance. The instance annotator starts the semantic resolution by identifying the most appropriate class from a (or a set of) manufacturing domain ontology (or ontologies) (MDO) to annotate each instance based on the mappings established between the context of that instance and the vocabularies (i.e., classes and properties) defined in the MDO. The primary goal of the semantic resolution knowledge base (SR-KB) is to resolve semantic heterogeneity that may occur in the instance annotation process and thus improve the accuracy of the annotated MSC instances. The experimental results demonstrate that the instance extractor and the instance annotator can effectively discover and annotate MSC instances while the SR-KB is able to improve both precision and recall of annotated instances and reducing human involvement along with the evolution of the knowledge base.

Committee: Drs. Yun Peng (Chair), Tim Finin, Yaacov Yesha, Matthew Schmill and Boonserm Kulvatunyou